Category: Accident Reports –  Page 4

Land Like a Crow Part 1

The entire world seemed to be watching when LOT airlines flight LO16 landed wheels up at Warsaw Airport in 2011. I wrote about it at the time, impressed with the smooth landing: The captain of the flight, Tadeusz Wrona, was the subject of much admiration as a result. His last name means crow in Polish,…

Read more… 30 Mar 18

Operational Failures: Execuflight 1526 Part Two

On the 10th of November 2015, a BAe 125 operated by Execuflight crashed into an apartment building while on approach to Akron Fulton International Airport. The captain, the first officer and seven passengers died. I looked at the flight in Trouble in the Cockpit: Execuflight 1526 Part One. The key question, which we discussed in…

Read more… 16 Feb 18

Trouble in the Cockpit: Execuflight 1526 Part One

On the 10th of November 2015, Execuflight flight 1526 was a British Aerospace HS 127-700A chartered for a flight across Ohio from Dayton-Wright Brothers Airport in Dayton to Akron Fulton International Airport. The British Aerospace 125 is a twin-engine mid-size corporate jet, designed by de Havilland as a small business jet (under the much cooler…

Read more… 9 Feb 18

An Administrative Failure: The Yak-52 Part 2

Last week I posted A Can Of Worms: The Yak-52 Qualitative Training Exercise in which a test pilot instructor lost his life during a standard training exercise. To recap, a Yak-52 suffered an engine failure, probably caused by the fuel pump. There were two pilots in the aircraft. In the back was the commander, who…

Read more… 19 Jan 18

A Can Of Worms: The Yak-52 Qualitative Training Exercise

There’s a lot to this, so I’ve split the analysis up into two parts. This week we’ll look at the details of the crash and next week I’ll focus on the administrative issues that led to it. In the beginning of November, the British Air Accidents Investigation Branch released their bulletin concluding their field investigation…

Read more… 12 Jan 18

Steve Fossett Disappearance

It was the 3rd of September in 2007 at around 09:30 local time in California when a Bellanca 8KCAB-180 (Super Decathlon) registration N240R disappeared in the ‘Nevada Triangle’. The 63-year-old pilot was Steve Fossett, a famous aviator and sailor. He is still the holder of multiple world records, including the fastest east-to-west transcontinental record for…

Read more… 27 Oct 17

Accident Reports

ATC and the Pilot Who Turned Back

Last week we looked at a general aviation crash in which the pilot reported a Mayday as a result of an engine failure. Eight minutes later, the pilot crashed into…

The Pilot Turned Back: Engine Failure Leads to Fatal Crash

On the 26th of July a single-engine light aircraft crashed in the woods near Colbert, Oklahoma while attempting a forced landing. The pilot had reported his emergency ten minutes earlier…

Demystifying

Thirty Years Since Air France Flight 296

Thirty years ago, on the 26th of June 1988, a brand new Airbus A320 crashed during a demonstration of its fly-by-wire capabilities, killing three passengers and demolishing the plane as…

Drone Killer

When I’m not obsessing about aviation, I write speculative fiction, including science fiction featuring near-future technology. So you can imagine I was pretty excited when I saw a headline last…

History

Building a B-29 Piece by Piece

I’m in Austria this week, giving a presentation about the representation of old women in science fiction. So it seemed only right to celebrate a woman in aviation who might…

The Odd Story of Richard Floyd McCoy Jr

I’ve been working hard on volume two of Without a Trace and, of course, I can’t resist a chapter on Dan Cooper, who successfully hijacked a Northwest Orient aircraft and…

Fun Stuff

For your amusement: weird and interesting NOTAMS

I was browsing around looking for interesting news when I saw that Reddit user justachamelion had posted a great question for /r/AskReddit: Pilots of Reddit, what are the weirdest or…

In case you were wondering what to get me for Christmas

There are lots of private jets up for sale but this one is special… It is a 1962 Lockheed JetStar 1329. The JetStar was a private project at Lockheed, originally…